180, again virtual worlds are places; ‘what makes them sites of culture… is that people interact in them’

180 virtual worlds “do become true communities after a time” (Curtis 1992 and others) [erm, but you’re not telling us what you mean by ‘communities’, this most comforting of fictions].

181 community rhetoric of Linden Lab, e.g. when citing “community sentiment” to alter the platform but without explaining ‘who constituted or spoke for the community in question’ [EXACTLY, that’s precisely why community is such as dodgy notion].

182 * social gravity: dots on screen beget dots on screen; what really mattered to residents were ‘social places’ [cf. empty cyberjaya, no social places]

182-183 events ‘involved a conjunction of place, time, and sociality’; events have to be synchronous to be events; technical constraints on events during fieldwork, max. 25 avatars; events as temporary groups [cf. my research on place-making in Subang Jaya], or more exactly ‘as groups temporarily formed in time and place’ [is group the best term?].

184 could learn a lot from perusing residents’ groups listed on their profiles; great big ‘furry’ community (animal avatars)

185 not many founding residents were religious; more arrived later

186 kindness is rewarded; some official recognition for altruism from Linden Lab, but not too significant; at any rate kindness and altruism predominated in SL; many types of acts of kindness, e.g. giving things away

187 disinhibition (old CMC topic) and griefing; social inhibitions not annihilated, only redefined (Reid 1999); 188 griefing could be a foundation of a specific kind of SL sociality with other griefers (troublemakers)

188 Manchester School taught us centrality of conflict to human endeavour [another link to my own place-making research]

196 some signs of ‘frontier ethic’ of residents’ taking law into own hands

197 dividual personhood [see earlier blog entries]; common to move between virtual worlds; sometimes stumbled upon old friends they had met in another virtual world; 198 this interworld experience allowed them to ‘reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of Second Life’